HE had just claimed his second club best and fairest after a near career-best season but many would not have realised that Travis Boak thought his career was over at the end of the 2019 season.
Boak made the revelation in the third episode of a new video series called “GFG Gratitude”.
Hosted by vice-captain Hamish Hartlett, the series will see Port Adelaide players and staff discuss how they have shown resilience to overcome challenges throughout their lives and the gratitude they have developed as a result.
Boak opened up about what motivates him in his 14th AFL season, what he does away from football to balance his life and why he has only developed an interest in reading in recent years.
For the first time, Boak also revealed how close he came to giving up the game last year.
The club’s longest-serving AFL captain was in fine form all season but injured his shoulder in the Round 19 loss to GWS.
He played out the season without pain but with significantly less power in his shoulder before undergoing a 2.5-hour surgery to repair a couple of torn tendons.
A week later he had knee surgery as well. And that’s when the doubt set in.
“I didn’t realise the extent of the shoulder injury until I went in to get surgery,” Boak said during part 3 of the first episode of GFG Gratitude.
“I was on the couch for basically two and a half weeks with a knee and shoulder and to be perfectly honest it was one of the most challenging times in my footy career.
“There was definitely stages where I thought I couldn’t get back and whether that was through the pain, through the fact that I was never going to get strength in my shoulder – I couldn’t move it for a month – and I just thought I would never get out of it.
“That’s the mind playing a lot of tricks. All I was thinking was how painful this is and how much strength I’ve lost.
“I was thinking ‘I just can’t move my shoulder, how am I going to get back to normal?’”
Boak admitted to feeling lost when he headed over to the United States to do some rehabilitation work at Red Bull headquarters.
“I went over to America after getting out of the sling – it was eight weeks in the sling – then I went over there and did some rehab stuff at Red Bull in their headquarters, which certainly helped.
“At that stage I was still thinking this is no good, I can’t do it.
“I basically thought this could be it, because I just thought as most surgeries and injuries happen, it was really hard to overcome, to think I would get over it.
“It was 8-10 weeks in and I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t lift it above my head and I was thinking, ‘wow, I’m not going to get it back.’
“I went back to see Austin after that.”
Boak has worked over recent years with movement specialist Austin Einhorn from Apiros and he helped instigate a change.
“Just having chats with him, I was telling him ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ Instantly my mindset was that I can’t do it. It was a negative mindset. That was the mindset I had for ten weeks and that’s probably why I thought that I was done,” Boak said.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘what CAN you do?’”
“Instantly I changed that mindset from what I can’t do to what I can and I started to feel positive again.
“It was a big shift. Part of that training was working on my shoulder but also my mindset as well.”
Watch the full GFG Gratitude chat with Hamish Hartlett and Travis Boak here.
